


Losing The Ability To Feel

by draw_a_circle_thats_the_foxhole



Series: Prompt Fills [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, This is basically just me philosophising about what being a nation would be like, and catharting about bad tea and being cold ALL the goddamn time, and making fun of the english
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24608923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draw_a_circle_thats_the_foxhole/pseuds/draw_a_circle_thats_the_foxhole
Summary: Set roughly Winter of 1916. Matt and Aditya drink bad tea and have a good conversation. Featuring the ANZACS and the roasting of Arthur. Set in the same storyline as Sure of the Sea.Crossposted from Tumblr.
Series: Prompt Fills [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779040
Kudos: 13





	Losing The Ability To Feel

**Author's Note:**

> Abstract Prompt 17: Losing the ability to feel.

“When did you learn Hindi?” Aditya asks one afternoon during rotation. Matthew’s soldiers are coming off the line, and the Indian divisions are moving in. It’s the same routine as usual. Men slowly trickle out of the trenches under cover of darkness and other’s creep in. Men rouse each other with hands-on shoulders and single finger’s pressed to mouths. Silence is key. There’s no oil left in the lamps, and the braziers are banned here since the last dugout fire, and it is cold. Bitterly, bitterly cold. Matt squats across from Aditya in front of the tiny camp stove. It is shaded from the enemy by the windbreak of scrap iron, so it doesn’t give their position away to artillery. It’s a place where conversations, if quiet, can happen safely.

“I didn’t,” Matt shrugged. He flexes his hands in front of the fire and when he has enough dexterity, pours tea into mugs, handing one over when it looks an appropriate shade of brown. “Only know little pieces,”

“I saw you this morning.” Aditya looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Bypassed the officers and went right to the sergeant. And the sergeant doesn’t speak English,”

“So you saw me gesturing like a windmill then,” Matt said, gave an uncomfortable grin. He’d never been very comfortable with attention or questions.

“You’ve got enough to get the point across,” Aditya looks down at his tea apprehensively but holds it close. Matt feels grubby next to him, doesn’t know how Aditya keeps himself a fair sight cleaner than any Canadian, officer or otherwise. Especially considering the weather. Even Matt’s fingers are blue when he pulls back his gun-mitts to hold the tea and breathe in the steam.

“Barely. And your men needed to know about the funk holes. Three collapsed on us in the last week. Killed a man in his sleep. Officers usually forget their men don’t sleep in beds in the dugout.” Matt shuddered, thinking about the corpse of a Ukrainian from Saskatchewan he had dug out from under the collapsed earth. The boy, killed by the shelter he’d carved into the sides of the trench to save his life.

Aditya hummed, satisfied with the answer and gave a smile. They’re rare on the front but more common on the first day of rotation than the last.

“Tell me,” Aditya passed the mug between his hands as if he was debating taking a drink or not. Matt didn’t blame him. The water had smelled brackish even before he’d added tea. “Was the first word you learned ‘vegetable’? Or was it ‘curry’?”

Matt is suddenly glad of his filthy face when his cheeks heat up with shame.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Aditya said, and his mouth was pointedly straight despite the twitch of a smile. “I’m glad you enjoy the food. Your father needs a pint of milk for a pinch of garam masala,”

Matt grinned, relaxing a little. “Dad gets heat exhaustion when I use too much nutmeg,”

“But really, what was the first word? Onion? Or garlic? You’re always looking for both.”

“Neither,” Matt shrugs. Vegetables were always in short supply, and he didn’t really know how to cook without at least one of the two. It seemed, more and more, that the army could barely just keep them on this side of ravenous. The Indians divisions got vegetables, he got the odd box of tradable things from Alfred. Sometimes he got lucky and got an onion or two. He took another sip of the tea. It tasted more and more like cabbage the longer it was exposed to air. “Sorry,”

“What for?” Aditya frowned. “You’re young still. You haven’t finished growing. You have time to learn more about another language.”

“No,” Matt rolled his shoulders, a little embarrassed and resisting the urge to duck a bit. His face was still hot. “The first word I learned. It was sorry,”

Aditya is trying not to laugh at him. “Of course, it was.” He hides a smile taking a drink and grimaces.

“I make a godawful cup of tea, sorry,” Matt wished it was coffee.

“That you do.” Aditya set the cup back down on the stove. “Though the fault is not entirely yours. Army tea is… regrettable,”

“What about the army isn’t regrettable?” Matt made a rude sound and dug around his coat for the flask of grog he’d saved from the dinner rations the night before. He offered it up as a toast, at a jaunty angle, shaking it a little. Aditya shook his head but then shrugged and made a small “Mm, why not,” sort of sound. He held out the cup, and Matt gave each of them a glug or two.

Face twisted up in a grimace, Aditya shakes his head after he takes a sip. “That never gets better. How do you drink that every day?”

“Only England’s finest paint thinner for Arthur Kirkland’s third favourite son,” Matt said bitterly, knocking back half the mug in two gulps. He wished he still had some of the bourbon Alfred had sent in his last care package. Aditya’s brow furrowed. Matt drank more to escape his gaze. Even as sharp and foul as army grog was, it sent ribbons of warmth across his body, gave him courage when he didn’t have any left, steadied his nerves. They’re sitting in peaceable silence now, just the whistle of the wind through the grates. No gunshots, no gurgling wounded, no screaming dead. In moments like that, Matt thinks he might make it to hear his next birdsong with his sanity intact. But not in silence. He’s used to Jack or Zee filling up the quiet with movement, with Jack’s inane chattering to anyone and anything and bickering with Zee. His family is nothing if not loud, lively, and distracting.

Aditya’s company is quiet, dignified. He’s the sort of man Matthew gets on best with. Calm, logical, patient. He’s older than them all put together. Father and Papa and the elder Beilschmidt brother are ancient to Matt. But Aditya is ancient to even them. He wonders vaguely if there’s anything under the sun that satisfies anymore when someone got that old. Much of his own father seems deadened by the centuries. But Father doesn’t grimace at the taste of army rum and army tea.

“What do you drink?” Matt asks, thinking of the spiced tea he’d had behind the lines once when the Indian divisions had swapped camp with the French on his flank.

“Paint thinner,” Aditya laughs, sits back onto a pile of sandbags and lifts his cup. “As long as it’s warm,”

“I mean at home.”

“There are as many kinds of tea as there are languages in my country,” Aditya shrugged placidly. “I have loved every one of them.”

“You can’t drink every single one every day thought!” Matt returned. Aditya was hard to read, but Matt did his best, searching him for… something. “What do you actually like to drink?”

Aditya frowns at him and turns Matt’s scan back on him. Old countries scanning for suspicious intent drag a sort of weight along with their observation, a heaviness of centuries. Matt doesn’t hide anything on his face around Aditya. He has no reason too. And Aditya could probably read anything Matt did try to hide anyway. Aditya has always been a distant presence. He had, however, dragged Matt out of Ypres the year before and had never been unkind, before or since. Matt doesn’t fear his scrutiny. Eventually, Aditya smiled, as if satisfied with what he had found on Matt’s face.

“Palm wine,” He finally says and his eyes are thousands of miles away at home. “It’s rather sweet, but you take the sap from certain kinds of palm trees, and it ferments quickly. Sometimes within a couple of hours its enough. Or you can let it sit, and it will get stronger and sourer, but it’s a delight!”

His voice sounded nostalgic, homesick. Matt pours them more tea and shoves a few more pieces of coal on the anaemic fire. Aditya shuffles closer.

“Sounds nice,” Matt sighed, leaning into his hand. “We make maple wine. It’s about the same process.” He could almost see the maples, thin and scarlet and just out of reach. He can almost smell them, earthy and nutty on the breeze. The soil of the Canadian shield was dense, compacted by glaciers that even centuries melted Matt could feel in his veins. Mountains had once laced up and down, but eroded by the centuries, it had left him with rocky soil and could taste the zinc and the salt of it.

“How old are you?” Aditya asked all of a sudden, startling him out of his own poisonous thoughts. He didn’t want to think about home. Home was strength and sorrow and everything good in him, but it was only weakness now, here, thousands of miles away. He was staring at Matt again, and Matt compulsively dragged his collar up.

“Three hundred and seventeen,” Matt said, sitting up straight.

“You’re an infant,” Aditya shook his head. “A babe in arms exposed to this.”

“And I have 200 years on Jack and Zee,” Matt said. “It’s not fair to them. They’re too young for this.”

“You’re all far young for this!” Aditya shook his head. “I never thought I would see mankind progress to this level of savagery. But to drag children into it!” He made a disgusted noise that Matt assumed was made at Arthur, and he couldn’t say he disagreed.

“It’s not fair on them,” Matt said.

“Nor you,” Aditya looked pensively into his mug. “Or I,”

Matt didn’t know what to say to that. His Papa had been invaded. He might have found himself here anyway even if Dad hadn’t taken up the cause and dragged the empire with him. But Aditya? He was from what Matt dimly remembered as a warm place thousands of miles away. He’d spent most of the crown’s tour of India too feverish to roll over much less take in the sights. He didn’t do well in warm climates.

“It doesn’t get easier then?” He asked, very gently, because he might not know the depth of Aditya’s sorrow, but he knew its breadth. Every square mile of his country and the lack of it beneath his feet ached like an old scar in his chest. “Missing home as you get older?”

“A little,” Aditya said. “Human pains are so very intense when we’re young. But you will never outgrow it. No matter how old we are, home is home. The lack of it will always ache.” He looked devastatingly sad for a moment, centuries-long grief older than Matt and maybe even Arthur had been alive. “But it is cruel, to tear you from home when you’ve hardly planted your roots. It is much harder to kill a plant with deep roots.”

“It’s not the longest I’ve been away,” Matt said. He thought of the years he’d spent in Australia after he had indulged the screaming need for just an inkling of control in his life in 1837. He thought of the prison ship and the burning sun, unnatural and agonising on his back. But he’d had Jack, who in his way, was a sort of home too. He swallowed down something painful born of love. “I’ll survive. But it never goes away? The pain of leaving home?”

“Never,” Aditya said. “I think your father has attempted to numb himself to the reality of our existence. Thinks that centuries have to make one cruel or they have not been long enough. But we never lose it. Every day people are born, and people die, every year we reap, and we plant. We build and tear down. There is always something new as the old fades. It brings life and feeling with it. Time isn’t only linear. There are patterns. And after a few centuries it… stabilises. I think. Like adulthood in a way. The fits of passion that come with youth settle a bit. But you won’t go numb if that’s what you fear.”

Matt dipped his head, nodding and hiding. Endless misery then. Endless pain in his lungs, endless wars to be dragged into. Thousands of years ahead of him if he was lucky. The wind seemed to blow colder then as if to remind Matt that home or abroad, his fate still rested under the north wind. He was always going to be scoured with ice as it willed. He shivered.

“You didn’t fear it at all!” Aditya looked startled. “You hoped for it!” He phrased it like a question, but it wasn’t one. He set his mug aside and looked very intense.

“Your humanity, our ties to humanity? It’s what will keep you sane when you have nothing else. Every heart that beats in your chest is a chance to do better. To be better. Wish for anything but that fading, do you understand me?” He leaned forward, hands clenching between his legs.

Matt was silent, humiliated at his flinching from their kind. Next to Jack, next to Zee, even next to Alfred, he was quiet and steady and mature. But under Aditya’s gaze at that moment, he had never felt more like a child. Aditya looked a bit kinder when Matt got up the courage to make eye contact again.

“They,” He nodded off in the direction where Matt’s soldiers were packing up their kits in their preparations to march behind the lines. “Are why we’re here. And they cannot numb your agony. But they can be your joy. Don’t align yourself with kings and politicians. It’s the ordinary people that will keep you. Live the cycles of years with them. Celebrate spring, peace and the festivals, mourn winter and war. It’s how we stay sane.”

“That’s why Father–”

“Has been half-mad for centuries?” Aditya laughed. “Yes. I believe it is. He likes to think himself rather posh and above the average man.”

When he leaves Aditya on the line, looking grim but rested, it’s with the joy and weariness of relief of leaving the front behind. Night has fallen, and Matt wears exhaustion as consistently as his winter coat these days, but he walks on. Weeks without sleep bowing his too-tall frame and with three days of beard on his face, he makes it out of the trench lines. It’s easiest to billet with his own soldiers, listen to his own accents read aloud all the two-month-old news before they fall into the sleep of the desperate and half-mad. He can get in line with boys from British Columbia and Nova Scotia and hope someone will toss him a bar of civilian soap that doesn’t feel like acid on their bare, freezing skin as icy water rains down from the green showerheads. He should find the officer’s showers with the warm water and expensive French soap and let himself into the command tents for real food and a real bed. Guts grumbling, body aching that sounds like the best choice. But mostly, he’s cold. Aditya’s words reverberate in his head again. Don’t align yourself with kings.

He journeys through the back trenches, stepping over sleeping men, dodging the rats underfoot, making his way through the passageways like he’s the ghost.

The freezing shower scours at least half his skin off, and new clothes somehow don’t smell any better than his own. But at least there are no lice in the seams. When he’s dressed, he leaves his lines of weary men and their familiar accents behind. The journey further back into camp feels like a whole hike. Eventually, he finds accents that sound like yowling cats, woven through with Irish, affection and alcohol. He doesn’t know he’s surprised when he finds a wallaby with a sweater hopping in dirty snow between the tents. He pokes his head in to see his siblings squashed together on cots shoved together, swaddled in blankets like the babies they are. Bright fire lights up the corner, and he knocks lightly on the pole. Jack snores, in response, rolls over violently because Jack never stops moving, even unconscious. Matt smiles. Zee turns on her side to find Jack’s back and grunts “Fuck off,” at Matt before she snorts awake, hair everywhere.

“Matt?” She asks blearily, looking rather like a startled owl.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Matt hesitated at the threshold unsure of his welcome.

“Well, are you going to get in here? Get under the blankets or bugger off! I can see the icicles forming out there, fuck!” She scoots over, pulled Jack with her and Matt rolled under a corner of the blanket.

“Your fucken freezin’, Mate,” Jack muttered and snuggled in close. He tugged both of them closer to him, and Matt is so goddamned tired he doesn’t even stop to think that, for the first time in a month, he hasn’t lost feeling in his feet as he falls asleep warm.

**Author's Note:**

> India made up a massive part of the British army in the Great War and he needs to be included way more than he is! Thank you stirringwinds for the name and some characterisation of Aditya. 
> 
> I'm on tumblr here:
> 
> https://draw-a-circle-thats-the-foxhole.tumblr.com/
> 
> I post history and Hetalia and aesthetics.
> 
> Kudos, comments and critiques are life. Thank you for reading!


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